The assortment was discovered in 2019, when workers who were extracting gravel from the river near the village of Deinham spotted a few unusual double-pointed iron objects and reported them to the Austrian monument authority.
In a study published Monday (Sept. 21) in the journal Antiquity, Trebsche and co-author Marion Berranger, an archaeologist at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard in France, detailed their analysis of the extraordinary collection of ancient iron, which dates to the third to second centuries B.C.
Archaeological divers examine a gravel pit where 500 ancient iron bars were discovered. (Image credit: Heinz Gruber, Bundesdenkmalamt)But the Deinham iron bars did not represent finished products. Rather, the double-pointed, semifinished bars — sometimes called ingots — were rough-shaped, intermediate goods that a blacksmith eventually would have forged into other objects.
Because the iron was found during gravel extraction with a large bucket excavator, the original context of the archaeological find was destroyed. This erased archaeologists' opportunity to figure out how the metal ended up in the Danube.
RELATED STORIES"The possibility of ritual deposition cannot be excluded," the researchers wrote in the study, but "most studies on river finds have concluded that iron bars are losses incurred during transport." Before the invention of trains, most ancient cultures transported heavy goods via waterways.
"It is incredible that such a large quantity of iron was transported at once and was available in a single exchange transaction in the Late Iron Age," Trebsche said. "This finding demonstrates the increased capacities of iron production that were reached in the 3rd/2nd century BC in the Danube region."
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